in reply to Re: No Beautiful Rule
in thread The Perl Hacker Inferiority Complex
I was not denouncing Lisp. Lisp has had all the time in the world to become a popular programming language, but it has only been used by a few groups that have latched on to it. Lisp's greatest accomplishment was affecting other languages. Languages like Perl and Python have borrowed from Lisp to become better languages because they took the good ideas and made them easier to use. If Lisp finally took off, that would be great, but it seems that it will always have its claim to fame as one of the great ancestor languages. I admit, there will always be purists out there writing Lisp and they are probably some of the best programmers.
So again, I have a high respect for Lisp, but I was trying to point out the real reasons why Perl is thought by many to be an ugly language. On the academic side Perl is a multi-paradigm mess, even I will admit that. It has become too complex to be able to write a compiler on your own( look at the number of implementations of Python vs Perl), and that is another reason that academics don't like it. But, Perl's redeeming quality is that it has always managed to "make easy things easy and hard things possible"(Camel3).
Maybe I will take a stab at that "Hackers and Painters" book. Sounds interesting.
So again, I have a high respect for Lisp, but I was trying to point out the real reasons why Perl is thought by many to be an ugly language. On the academic side Perl is a multi-paradigm mess, even I will admit that. It has become too complex to be able to write a compiler on your own( look at the number of implementations of Python vs Perl), and that is another reason that academics don't like it. But, Perl's redeeming quality is that it has always managed to "make easy things easy and hard things possible"(Camel3).
Maybe I will take a stab at that "Hackers and Painters" book. Sounds interesting.
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Meditations